Democracynow.org – British resident Shaker Aamer has been freed from Guantánamo after more than 13 years behind bars. Aamer had been cleared for release since 2007, but the Pentagon kept him locked up without charge. During his time in captivity, Aamer claims he was subjected to abuses including torture, beatings and sleep deprivation. At one point, he lost half his body weight while on a hunger strike. Aamer is en route to London where he’ll rejoin his wife and four children. “If you think about how much our world has changed, it is like they’re dropping them into a completely different place with very little support, and there’s no right to a remedy for the allegations of torture—which are absolutely credible—for the prolonged arbitrary detention and for any other violations that happened,” says our guest Widney Brown, director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights.

Sitting in Committee room G in the Houses of Parliament on 23rd October from 6 to 7.30 pm was a sobering affair. While hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues and chaired by Lord Alderdice, the event’s speaker was Professor Padraig O’Malley who had recently published The Two State Delusion which the New York Times described as both “impressive and frustrating”. It is indeed impressive in its observations.

Democracynow.org – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, activist and Presbyterian minister Chris Hedges, whose latest book is “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” spoke Saturday at New York’s “Rise Up October” rally and march to end police violence. In his address, Hedges spoke about the effects that police violence and mass incarceration has on families. “There are husbands and wives severed, sometimes forever, from their spouses,” said Hedges. “There are sisters and brothers that have been torn apart, but this morning we remember most the children, those whose mothers and fathers are locked behind bars or whose parents will never come home again, whose tiny lives have been shattered, whose childhoods have been stolen, who endure the painful stigma of loss or of having a mother or father in prison and cannot comprehend the cruelty of this world.”

The deadly US airstrike on an Afghan hospital has been downplayed by Washington as a “tragic mistake” committed in the “fog of war”. But recently disclosed documents on the secret policy of drone assassinations by the Pentagon reveals a cold-blooded calculus to “kill all” within a designated strike zone, even resulting in 90 per cent “collateral damage” of “unintended targets”.

In college, Economics 101 is often described as the social science discipline that deals with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. MIT Economist Paul Samuelson liked to focus on scarcity, or more specifically, the allocation of scarce resources. “Abundance” was always a pretty word with an idyllic connotation for Professor Samuelson. I often wonder why there weren’t a few classes about the real-life consequences of abundance, along with scarcity and people’s material welfare.

The Dodd-Frank regulations are so lethal to community banks that some say the intent was to force them to sell out to the megabanks. Community banks are rapidly disappearing — except in North Dakota, where they are thriving.

Democracynow.org – One of the most secretive military campaigns in U.S. history is under the microscope like never before. In a major exposé based on leaked government documents, The Intercept has published the most in-depth look at the U.S. drone assassination program to date. “The Drone Papers” exposes the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, revealing a number of flaws and far more casualties than the intended targets. The documents were leaked to The Intercept by an unnamed U.S. intelligence source who says he wanted to alert Americans to wrongdoing. We are joined by The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, lead author of “The Drone Papers” exposé.

On Oct. 13, Abby Martin hosted a live analysis of the Democratic Party debate. She was joined by politician Jill P. Carter, who represents Maryland’s 41st legislative district of Baltimore City; Jared Ball, assistant professor of communication studies at Morgan State University; Kamau K. Franklin, Southern Regional Director of the American Friends Service Committee; Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin Magazine; and journalist Sarah Jaffe, who co-hosts Dissent magazine’s “Belabored” podcast. TeleSUR

Hypothesis of its epigenetic and mass psychological role inside the mass mental apparatus

Elections for the political offices in the US are incomparably worse than any horror movies, as they repeatedly and inevitably reproduce the basic politico-economic structures and institutions of class divisions, inequality, injustice, vast deprivations, crime, mental illness, selfishness, aggressions, wars, and severe damages to the ecology of nature and human nature-within the context of the most advanced capitalist political economy and the most developed scientifico-technological forces of production and destruction-which, among other things, invariably cause destruction of tens of millions of lives globally, as well as, to a lesser extent, domestically, through wars and invasions, impoverishment and deprivations that cause severe multidimensional damages to human lives, diabolical expenditures of financial and human resources on the military war machine and production of ever more destructive and advanced weapons and systems of mass destruction, and great damages to the biosphere and all the life-supporting systems of the planet. No horror movie can come even close to the reality produced by these “democratic” elections.

In this episode of Days of Revolt, host Chris Hedges discusses Israeli military policy in the Gaza Strip with author and journalist Max Blumenthal. Together they recount Palestinian testimonies about Israeli military aggression during Operation Protective Edge as described in Blumenthal’s latest book, and detail the brutal tactics used by the Israeli state in attempt to suppress Palestinian resistance. teleSUR

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The Senate voted to save net neutrality. Now we need the House of Representatives to do the same, or else the FCC will let ISPs like Comcast and Verizon ruin the internet with throttling, censorship and unnecessary fees. Click the image below to write to Congress.

The Golden Rule

“That which is hateful to you do not do to another ... the rest (of the Torah) is all commentary, now go study.” - Rabbi Hillel

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

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